A manual for fibre-terrorists

July 15 2003
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Sean Gorman's professor called his dissertation "tedious and unimportant".
Gorman didn't talk about it on dates because "it was so boring they'd start
staring up at the ceiling". But since the September 11 terrorist attacks,
Gorman's work has become such hot property that companies want to seize it,
government officials want to suppress it, and al-Qaeda operatives would love a
copy.

Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a goatee, this George
Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial
sector in the American economy and the fibre-optic network that connects them.
He can click on a bank and see if it has communication lines running into it and
where, or drill into a cable trench and determine how to create the most havoc
with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links,
asking himself: "If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?"

Gorman, 29, is one of a growing number of researchers whose work is under
scrutiny for national security reasons. "Never in my wildest dreams would I
have imagined I'd be briefing government officials and private-sector CEOs," he
says. Invariably they want his work classified.

"Classify my dissertation? Crap. Does this mean I have to redo my PhD?
They're worried about national security, I'm worried about getting my degree."

"He should turn it in to his professor, get his grade - and then they both
should burn it," says Richard Clarke, who until recently was the White House
cyberterrorism chief. "The fibre-optic network is our country's nervous
system."

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The fibres carry impulses responsible for internet traffic, telephones,
mobile phones, military communications, bank transfers, air traffic control and
signals to power grids and water systems. "You don't want to give terrorists a
road map to blow that up," Clarke says.

†Some people argue that the critical targets should be publicised
because it would force the Government and industry to protect them.

Gorman compiled his map using material he found on the internet, none of it
classified. His interest in maps came from his childhood, he says, because he
"grew up all over the place". Five years ago, he began work on a masters
degree in geography. His intention was to map the physical infrastructure of the
internet, to see who was connected, who was not, and to measure its economic
impact.

But what he ended up doing knocked the wind out of John M. Derrick jnr,
chairman of Pepco Holdings, which provides power to Washington DC. When shown
sample pages of Gorman's findings, he said: "This is why CEOs of major power
companies don't sleep well these days. Why in the world have we been so stupid
as a country to have all this information in the public domain?" Derrick
recently received an e-mail from an atlas company offering to sell him a map of
the US and its electricity generation and transmission systems. He replied:
"With friends like you, we don't need any enemies."

At the other end of the free-speech spectrum is John Young, a New York
architect who, with a friend, created a website that features aerial pictures of
nuclear weapons storage areas, military bases, ports, dams and secret government
bunkers - along with driving directions. The FBI has been in touch, he says, but
the site is still up. "We like defying authority as a matter of principle," he
says.

John McCarthy, who oversees Gorman's project at the university, says that
when Gorman and his research partner, Laurie Schintler, presented their findings
to government officials, "they said, `Let's scarf this up and classify it.' "
When they showed them to a forum of financial services companies - clicking on a
single cable running into a Manhattan office and revealing the names of 25
telecommunications providers - the executives suggested that they not be allowed
to leave the building with the laptop.

Afterwards, the group decided to hold a simulated cyber assault and bomb
attack on an undisclosed city with the telecommunications industry and the
National Communications System, to measure the impact on financial services.

McCarthy hopes that the GMU research will help solve a risk-management
problem: "We know we can't have a policeman at every bank and switching
facility, so what things do you secure?"

Terrorists, presumably, are exploring the question. In videotapes, bin Laden
has urged his followers to destroy the US economy by striking at its "joints".
Every day, Gorman tries to identify those joints, sitting in a grey cinderblock
lab secured by an electronic lock, multiple sign-on codes and a paper shredder.
Only Gorman, Schintler and their research instructor are allowed inside.

Brenton Greene, director of infrastructure co-ordination at the Department of
Homeland Security, says the project is "a cookbook of how to exploit the
vulnerabilities of our nation's infrastructure". He applauds Gorman's work, as
long as he refrains from publishing details.

All this is a bit heavy for Gorman. GMU has determined that
he will publish only the most general aspects of his work. "Academics make their
name as an expert in something. . . . If I can't talk about it, it's hard
to get hired. It's hard to put `classified' on your list of
publications on your resume."†